OnePlus, an electronics manufacturer based in China, has reportedly been shipping its line of popular smartphones with a hidden backdoor that could allow a hacker to hijack the device relatively effortlessly. They found that the application - used for factory testing - could be easily used to gain root access to phones.

While we don't see this as a major security issue, we understand that users may still have concerns and therefore we will remove the adb root function from EngineerMode in an upcoming OTA. But Elliot Alderson found that the tool could be exploited by hackers to gain root access to a device, essentially gaining backdoor access into it where they could then take over the phone.

The app provides users with root-level access to the phone without needing to unlock its bootloader, according to Engadget.

The backdoor is provided through an application called Engineer Mode that ships pre-installed on the devices. Once the app was decompiled, a password was still needed for the app so that it would give root access to devices. With root access, an attacker could change just about anything about the device's software. It has been found on the OnePlus 5, as well as the OnePlus 3 and 3T.

He was able to find a system app named EngineerMode that is actually a Qualcomm factory app with the ability to toggle components such as the charging chip, GPS, NFC and others - as this app shouldn't be included in consumer-side ROMs, it's a target app that malicious actors will want to crack into.

We've also we've reached out to OnePlus and will update this story when we receive comment. The company already drew criticism earlier this year over its onerous data collection practices, in which the company sucked up sensitive data from user devices and transmitted that information with each device's serial number attached.

The discoverer of the app had a problem.

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